EXTRATERRITORIAL by George Steiner. 210 pages. Afheneum. $7.95.
Nobody but Critic George Steiner could write in all seriousness of "the erotic relations between speaker and speech." To him, language is fundamentally the language of love: man wooing meaning, down to the coyest nuance, the most maidenly scruple. Like a Kinsey of linguistics, Steiner submits his report on the current state of the word-id in these ten brilliant, slightly obsessed essays, successors to his most recent collection, Language and Silence (1967), and forerunners to a promised full-scale study of multilingualism.
How goes the...